The Night We Met

by Zoë Folbigg

  Who was it?

  When did they come?

  Are they getting ready to clear her stuff out?

  Do they know something I don’t?

  He looked back at his phone and checked in to see if he could read those sports stories online. To see how his deputy was managing. How it all looked. But it looked like a blur, the scrolling hurt his eyes. His wife’s skull had been drilled into and surgeons were touching her brain, right now.

  He felt sick. His heart raced.

  I’ve had too many coffees.

  Daniel looked for the kidney-shaped cardboard bowl that had been lying around, in case he threw up. A rising nausea sloshing in his belly. A piercing pain to his forehead.

  She’s not even had so much as a headache.

  He listened to the low chatter on the ward, to see if he could hear the nurses’ station, and whether they might be talking about Olivia, and how to break it to the husband.

  Surely the surgeon would tell me first.

  He thought about life without Olivia.

  Oh god.

  He remembered how mundane the days of young adulthood were, spent on his parents’ sofa when he daydreamed about Olivia and how he could find her again. He remembered stagnation, Annabel and quiet cups of tea. He saw his past in black and white and thought about how Olivia’s laugh and her honesty brought all the colours of the world into his life. His nausea worsened as he thought about her pulsating brain, exposed from its beautiful shield, as medics in masks hacked away at it. The cancer and its tendrils.

  He thought about her serene yet scared face as she was wheeled away, and remembered the last time he saw her looking so vulnerable on a hospital trolley. In a birthing suite, having been through the agony of delivering their dead son. He wanted to see her, to hold her, to pull her into him, but panicked that he might never be able to again. His body filled with dread as he pictured the scene of Olivia not coming round, of that being It. Of having to tell the girls. Of life going back to black and white.

  He rubbed his eyes again and looked at his phone. The messages.

  Sorry. No news. Still waiting x

  Twenty-One

  June 1998

  Cambridgeshire, England

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea, love?’ Silvia asked her son’s girlfriend, Annabel. ‘I’ve got a million reports to read, I need another cuppa to get me through.’

  Annabel shook her head but kept her eyes glued on her Catherine Cookson book. Daniel looked from the TV to Annabel, sitting on what had become ‘her chair’, to see if she was going to say anything to his mum, or just keep her head in the book.

  How about, ‘No thank you’?

  He took a swig from his can of Boddingtons. Matt and his dad were already on their third.

  ‘Want me to make it, Mum?’

  ‘Oh don’t worry love, I need a break. A change of scenery.’

  Silvia took off her reading glasses, dropped them to the chain around her neck and made her way to the kitchen. Daniel nudged Matt with his foot, sitting at the other end of the long cream sofa, to tell him to turn over from Blind Date to Brazil v Chile on BBC1.

  ‘Has it started yet?’ asked John, their dad, as he walked in from the garage with an assortment of sticks. He liked to fashion pieces of wood into chopping boards, chess sets and percussion instruments with his plane, lathe, coping saw and clamps in the garage. It was a nice outlet to offset number crunching in the bank.

  ‘Build-up’s just starting,’ said Matt jovially.

  ‘Well, move up then son.’

  ‘Only if you put that sharp stick down!’

  Daniel pulled his legs in to let their dad sit between them and looked over at Annabel again, unmoved. Oblivious to family life – his family life – around her. Lasagne, beers, marking books and Saturday night telly.

  ‘You too Matt!’ John ordered. ‘Move along.’

  Daniel knew that at 24 and 26, both he and Matt ought to have moved out by now, but wondered what their parents thought of another adult living under their roof rent-free, as Annabel was always there. In the best chair. Not engaging.

  Annabel stared, absorbed by her book, her small brow furrowed. Her face would have been quite pretty if it weren’t so sullen; her blue eyes might have sparkled were they not hostile; her small mouth might have looked cherubic were it not downturned. Daniel often wondered what Annabel looked like when she laughed; what Matt was doing with her; what she was like in bed. Because he couldn’t for the life of him see what his brother saw in her. They were a strange pairing. Matt was sociable and chipper – the one who always wore a Santa hat at Christmas, started a cheer of ‘Oggy oggy oggy!’, and knew most of his supermarket customers by name.

  ‘Yes Mrs Pilch, I’ll carry the turkey to your car for you.’

  ‘Is there anything else I can help you with today, Mr Bailey?’

  ‘Ooh, don’t worry about that, Sue, I’ll put it back for you.’

  Annabel was the frostiest employee of every month and the rest of the staff were glad when she finished her studies, left the cheese counter and started working at the accountant’s full-time.

  ‘Funny little thing,’ the Safeway’s stalwarts would say, although never in earshot of Matt.

  As Matt lifted one buttcheek and let a fart out into the upholstery, his dad tutted and Daniel got up. Perhaps he used all his charm up at work.

  ‘Gross. I’ll go help Mum.’

  Annabel hadn’t even batted an eyelid at the noxious fart, and it annoyed Daniel that he was spending Saturday night with her and not Olivia. He hadn’t stopped thinking about Olivia since he left her flat two nights ago; since he sent her an email first thing the next morning. Was her forehead OK? Did she sleep it off? What if she puked and choked on her own vomit? What had happened with the guy in the toilet? What did she take? What was with all those bottles? Who was looking after her?

  Daniel walked into the kitchen.

  ‘Want a hand?’

  ‘Oh thank you darling, yes please. See if anyone wants some Battenberg cake, will you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Daniel poked his head back around the living-room door.

  ‘Who’s for Battenberg?’

  His dad rubbed his hands together in glee; he didn’t need to answer that. Battenberg was the way to John Bleeker’s heart.

  ‘Ooh, I’ll have a cup of tea with it as well, son.’

  ‘Mum’s already making a pot.’

  ‘No thanks,’ chirruped Matt, watching the national anthems.

  Annabel scrunched up her face, didn’t look up, and said, ‘Yuk.’

  She’d made the same face at the dinner table when Silvia presented her with a vegetable lasagne, and she asked for a cheese and tomato pizza instead. Annabel was that curious anomaly of a vegetarian who didn’t like vegetables, and who didn’t appreciate Silvia’s efforts to be inclusive.

  ‘I’ll just pop a pizza in the oven,’ she had said, apologising to Annabel that she would have to wait another sixteen to eighteen minutes for her dinner.

  ‘What did you say?’ Daniel asked from the doorway.

  Annabel glanced up, a contemptuous look on her face.

  ‘I’m not a fan of marzipan.’ She pretended to gag.

  How about, ‘No thank you’ then?

  Back in the kitchen Daniel rubbed his mum’s back. He’d felt sorry for her with lasagne gate, busting a gut to make two different types when she had thirty reports to write. Making a round of tea for an ungrateful rabble. No one made tea for her.

  ‘What’s that for?’ she asked fondly, surprised.

  ‘Nothing Mum, just trying to help.’

  ‘Ahh, well you check the tea in the pot then, while I take that into your father.’

  Silvia stopped to appraise her son.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, looking up and rubbing his forehead.

  ‘Yeah, fine.’

  Silvia wasn’t sure, but she took the cake plate into John anyway.

  As Daniel stared
at the teabags swirling in the pot, he felt agitated, not fine. He hadn’t stopped thinking about Olivia in the forty-eight hours since he’d left her flat. The Friday at work had been dreadful. After he walked around King’s Cross, waiting for the first train home, he slumped on his bed and slept for two hours before going in late at 9.30 a.m.

  Viv had given him a bollocking for poor timekeeping and suggested maybe he go on a time management course. He smiled and said it wouldn’t happen again. And spent the day fretting about Olivia – how she was – while he tried to write his stories.

  He sent her an email as soon as he got to work, to let her know that he hoped she was OK, but he hadn’t had a reply all Friday, and the internet was down at home. It was rarely up. He would have to wait until Monday to see if there was a response.

  She probably wouldn’t have gone into college on Friday.

  Not in the state she would have been in.

  Daniel stirred the tea and got lost in a trance, of water and whirls and china and chinking, as he thought about Olivia and wondered if anyone was checking in on her. If she was up and out again. Had she watched Italy beat Norway earlier? Was she happy?

  His mum walked back into the kitchen.

  ‘Annabel wants a Diet Coke.’

  ‘Well, why doesn’t she get it then?’

  Silvia stopped and looked at Daniel, shocked by his uncharacteristic snappiness.

  ‘It’s fine, love, I was coming for the tea anyway.’

  ‘I’ll take it in, Mum.’

  Daniel took the tea tray into the living room and poured out three cups. As he sat down to watch Ronaldo’s Brazil take on Zamorano’s Chile, he wondered what the fuck he was doing there. At home with his parents, with Matt and Annabel. Again. On a Saturday night. Even the usual soothing salve of football wasn’t helping.

  That’s it. He needed a plan.

  If I don’t hear back by Monday, I’ll email again. Then I’ll go into London. See if she’s OK. Tell her how I feel. Maybe have a look at some estate agents and see about flatshares.

  Twenty-Two

  September 2017

  London

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s a grape.’

  ‘In Italian?’

  ‘Uva.’

  Daniel smiled, although he wasn’t certain of the word uva himself, he knew Olivia was right.

  ‘Remember once, you couldn’t remember the English for them and you called them “little green bubbles”? So cute.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  The fact that Olivia recalled both the word uva and the incident he was talking about – during her early days with him back in London – was all Daniel needed to assure him they hadn’t cut out the wrong part of her brain.

  The relief was thick in the air, unhindered by Olivia’s grogginess, as she sat up drinking bad coffee and eating limp toast. A chink of light got through the small, high window leading to street level outside, highlighting her toast on its plate, as shadows regularly dulled it, from people walking the pavements of Bloomsbury.

  ‘I miss the baked hake, the sunshine. Antonio Banderas…’ she said, looking around the redbrick recovery ward.

  Daniel smiled. Further relief. Although he wasn’t quite as fond of Dr Lorca as his wife had been – he was the bastard who delivered the terrible blow back in Ibiza.

  As Daniel sat watching Olivia cautiously eating, shunning the cheese rectangle in its sweaty packet, he waited for the consultant to come by. He needed confirmation that this most horrific of days had been worth it.

  Daniel tried to focus on Olivia’s face, and not the tube that made a suction noise as it pulled and drained liquid along its tunnels, jutting out of a mass of hair under a bandage. Daniel wondered if particles of the tumour were draining out along it, or whether it had all come out in one clean slice. The thought made him nauseous again.

  Olivia had remembered who her husband was. That he was 43 and she was 42. What grapes were. That the operation was over and what it had been for. She had asked after Flora and Sofia, and Daniel had assured her that Mammas Una and Due had collected them from school and they were in the Huf Haus in Guildington, doing their homework. She seemed to understand everything about this scenario, to Daniel’s huge relief.

  The urge to go to the toilet was pressing on Daniel’s bladder but he daren’t go in case the surgeons came around to evaluate Olivia, so at 10 p.m., when the team visited her bay, Daniel almost wet himself in relief.

  ‘Ahh, here you are!’ said Mr Greene, the small, senior consultant neurosurgeon, even though he knew that’s exactly where Olivia would be. He was accompanied by Dr Okereke, Olivia’s consultant from Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge, although this was clearly Mr Greene’s patch. He had a cold authority about him; reassuringly competent, but not as good as Dr Okereke or Dr Lorca at looking his patients in the eye.

  Daniel stood up and Dr Okereke shook her head, urging him to sit down. Her dark purple lipstick had worn away but for the corners of her mouth and her look of compassion and kindness made Daniel feel fearful. That the operation wasn’t a success.

  Would they know that by now?

  ‘How are you feeling, Mrs Messina?’ asked Mr Greene cryptically.

  Daniel didn’t like the formalities. He preferred it when they called her Olivia. Treated her like a human rather than a name on their daily list. Dr Okereke always called her Olivia back in Cambridge. Daniel hoped she would today.

  Cut to the chase.

  ‘Bit groggy – drunk like a monkey really. But otherwise OK.’

  Daniel smiled to himself again. It was one of those phrases Olivia would translate literally, and not notice when people didn’t understand.

  Ubriaco come una scimmia.

  Olivia hadn’t been drunk like a monkey for years.

  Mr Greene and Dr Okereke took her humour to be a good thing, and Dr Okereke laughed.

  ‘She said she doesn’t even have a headache,’ Daniel piped up proudly, but Mr Greene didn’t smile, he continued to look from data charts and clipboards to Olivia’s face, his face not giving much away. He didn’t respond to Daniel, but Dr Okereke gave him a warm smile with her sparkling brown eyes as if to say, Funny that isn’t it?

  ‘Yes, you’re going to feel woozy,’ said Mr Greene, looking up over his glasses at Olivia. ‘A soreness of the head, but mainly external, where the incision was made and where we went in through the scalp and skull.’

  Daniel looked at the liquid in the vacuum tube coming out of Olivia’s head and wanted to be sick again.

  ‘But the operation went terribly well. I’m very pleased with what I’ve done.’

  Daniel and Olivia exhaled huge sighs in unison and exchanged a look.

  ‘We removed a mass of almost five centimetres, as expected, and we feel we got it all out and are pleased with how tidy the bone flap looks.’

  Olivia was a bit too groggy to speak now, so Daniel spoke for her.

  ‘Bone flap?’

  ‘Where we went in through the skull – but it’s all been replaced with titanium miniplates and stitched up – Olivia’s hair will eventually hide the scar,’ Dr Okereke reassured them. Olivia pushed the toast away and Mr Greene continued.

  ‘The tumour will now be looked at in closer detail; next steps will be some radiotherapy to the brain – just as a belt and braces approach.’

  Belt and braces?

  Olivia didn’t know what that meant. Daniel’s heart sank. He’d so hoped this was going to be the end of it.

  ‘You can do that back at Addenbrooke’s, under me,’ said Dr Okereke, wide-eyed and enthusiastic despite her fatigue after a long day of surgery. ‘About three or four sessions, depending on how things look.’

  How things look?

  Daniel opened his mouth but didn’t know where to start.

  ‘It’s perfectly painless,’ dismissed Mr Greene, seeming keen to move onto his next brain, or home at this hour. It must have been a gruelling day for him too.

  But he does this ev
ery day.

  ‘We’ll talk you through all that in a few weeks, give you time to recover from the surgery,’ added Dr Okereke. ‘You did really well,’ she said, giving Olivia all the credit Mr Greene was taking for the success of the operation.

  ‘I’d like to keep you here for two or three nights,’ Greene interjected, reminding everyone of the pecking order. ‘But let’s play that by ear, and I’ll see you on my rounds tomorrow.’

  ‘The nurses will watch your pain relief,’ Dr Okereke added.

  ‘Thank you,’ Olivia and Daniel both said, although they weren’t really sure if this was a good thing, and what radiotherapy actually meant. Daniel knew he would spend another train journey online, googling meanings and explanations, through tunnels of fear and despair until he arrived home.

  He stood up. He didn’t know what the etiquette was for someone who had seen the inside of his wife’s head and taken a five-centimetre tumour out of it. Did he hug the surgeons? Pat them on the back or arm? It all seemed very formal, but Dr Okereke took the dilemma away by extending an elegant, precise hand.

  ‘Take care Daniel, you get some rest too.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Daniel said, clasping her hand with both of his. Mr Greene nodded and went on his way.

  Daniel slumped back into the chair and tried to look at Olivia without looking at the suction tube coming out of her head. She gave a woozy smile. Through all this she had been optimistic and casually upbeat; Daniel didn’t know how she’d done it. And today, after going through actual brain surgery, she was managing to sit up in bed, attempting to eat.

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Fuck!’ they both said, marvelling at the wonder and terror of the day.

  Twenty-Three

  July 1998

  London

  Rat-a-tat-tat.

  Daniel’s hand rasped on the shiny black door, sunk into the oblong lines of an archway in Lexington Street. He hadn’t remembered the vegetarian restaurant next door, nor the French bistro, tanning shop and salon opposite, all of which had been closed at 3 a.m. on a Thursday night last month. So why would he? He had only noticed the black door, jumping out in a sea of black doors, when Olivia had picked it out. Dazzling like the right answer on a gameshow as she finally recognised it as hers and the relief of warm shelter lifted the darkness of Soho.